To Manchester’s Gay Village for the manifesto launch of the Workers Party of Great Britain. Few of George Galloway’s Lancashire mosque elders ventured into such a decadent part of town. Silly old them. They missed a cracker.
Mr Galloway, the party’s supreme leader, made a trenchant, note-free speech of such effortless breadth that it seemed we might be in for a full Fidel (Cuba’s late president Castro could talk for four-and-a-half hours).
Discussion ranged from military war, which we were told to expect by December if Sir Keir Starmer became PM, to various references to backsides.
We also heard demands for a referendum on the ‘Ruritanian’ monarchy, with Mr Galloway backing Princess Anne to be the country’s first president.
Having met the princess, the Oliver Cromwell of Rochdale adjudged that she came up to scratch.
Oh, and Britain needed a public laundry service. This, he noted, was a policy taken from the 1945 manifesto of a certain C.R. Attlee. It doesn’t bear thinking how many socks a nationalised launderette might mislay.
We were on the ninth floor of a new hotel. If attendance was slight, it was possibly because a fire alarm had just cleared the building. Blithely arriving 15 minutes late, Mr Galloway called his manifesto ‘a very beautiful document’.
It is certainly the only one so far to call for retirement at 60, for the governor of the Bank of England to be a proletariat and for a cull of Royal Navy admirals.
Palestine is Mr Galloway’s main thrust, but he had other aces up the sleeve of (dare one say?) his slightly under-laundered looking jacket: no more professional politicians to sit in the House of Lords; a referendum on Net Zero; obliteration of the Arts Council in its current form. Much more of that sort of thing and he could sail into the candidates’ book at the Drones Club.
Sunak and Starmer were gutless shrivellers who did not deserve to be PM, he declared, repeating the old line that they were two cheeks on the same bottom.
The only party leader ‘saying something with zeal and speaking in human’ was Nigel Farage, but Farage was just ‘the third cheek’ on that gluteus maximus (anatomy not a Galloway strong point) because he was a former City worker who was in bed with Donald Trump.
‘If anyone is going to be leader of the opposition to Sir Keir Starmer, then that should be me,’ cried Mr Galloway. Lest anyone thought he was joking, he repeated it: ‘That should be me!’
Beside him his much younger wife Gayatri closed her eyes and nodded, like someone chewing a goodish custard tart. During one mauve passage a member of the audience shouted an evangelical ‘Yes!’
The Workers’ Party was ‘the spirit of Labour’s past’ and it possessed ‘some of the best parliamentary candidates in the land’, averred Mr Galloway, 69, who wore his trilby throughout the event.
A repeated theme was that our culture had ‘lost its religion’. He did not believe ‘the woke armies of the West’ could defeat more ruthless forces such as North Korea, China and Russia. He complained that, since Blairism, British patriotism was a dirty word and ‘people don’t even know if they’re men or women’.
He is a not unTrumpian performer: boasts tripping from his tongue amid little shrugs. Media outlets were attacked. The ‘deep-state’ BBC had been ‘working for Keir Starmer for years in everything they do’ and he accused Sky News of giving Mr Farage endless publicity.
Was there a hint of demagogue-envy at one point?
Mr Galloway complained that unlike Farage he had not been invited to join ‘the Seven Dwarfs’ TV debate featuring the likes of Penny Mordaunt, Angela Rayner and the little Greens.
‘The Welsh nationalists were in it, with a fellow whose name I can’t even pronounce!’ Why was the Workers’ Party not asked to join that mass debate? ‘Because,’ smouldered Mr Galloway, ‘I’d wipe the floor with them.’